Tour de France: the great individual team sport

The two or three of you who’ve stuck with me through this series on the Tour de France might have noticed that I have tended to talk about the competition in team terms, but the prizes in individual terms. Yep, that’s really how it works. Pro cycling is either the most individualistic of team sports, or the most team-oriented of individual sports; it’s kind of hard to tell which one. There is a prize for the team with the lowest combined time for the Tour, but that prize gets so little attention that I didn’t even bother mentioning it in my ‘How to Win’ post. All of the top prizes in the Tour go to individuals; but those individuals couldn’t possibly win without an entire retinue working its hardest to put them in a place to succeed.

Twenty-two nine-person teams start the Tour de France (when I talk about 200 riders, I’m rounding. There are 198 riders on the starting line the first day). I say ‘start’ because if a rider is forced to abandon the race due to injury or faces a time elimination, they aren’t replaced. The team simply has to do with less for the rest of the Tour. Sky, for example, is now down to seven riders.

These teams are built on two different basic models:

1. GC Teams–these teams are built around great all-around riders. The ultimate goal for any cycling team is, of course, to have one of their members win the GC. Going into the Tour, Sky, Tinkoff-Saxo, and Astana were the leading GC teams this year; with the injuries to Froome and Contador, only Astana remains as a top GC team. We’ll see if anyone rises up to fill the gap. But many teams go into the Tour knowing that the odds of ending it with a teammate in a yellow jersey are slim to none. They just don’t have the personnel for it. Some of those teams therefore form around a completely different strategy, #2 below. Other teams take what I might call a ‘GC lite’ approach.
   1. GC lite–the best all-around rider on these teams is still developing, or is on the downward slope of their career, or is simply good but not great. For them, a GC win is realistically out of reach, but they choose intermediate goals on the GC spectrum. They might aim for a podium finish (top 3), or a top 10 finish, or maybe to wear the yellow for just one stage. I’d say Tejay Van Garderen’s team, BMC, went into the Tour with a GC lite strategy; they overtly stated that they’re looking for a top 5 finish. They’re kind of a heavy GC lite, and with those Froome and Contador injuries they could be setting their sights higher now.
2. Sprint teams–these teams don’t have an all-around rider who is ready to compete for yellow, but they do have someone who can go very, very, very fast over short distances. These teams aim for stage wins, green points, or both. Marcel Kittel’s Giant-Shimano team, Andrei Greipel’s Lotto-Belisol, and Peter Sagan’s Cannondale team are the big sprint teams this year. Omega Pharma-Quickstep would have been as well, except that their leader Mark Cavendish was injured on stage 1. There’s also something of a ‘Green lite’ strategy, in which a team might focus on grabbing a stage win or two.

Both of these types of teams has riders in three basic positions. It gets way more complicated than this, but I’m drawing the lines crudely.

The Top Man

This is the guy you think can actually take the prize, whether that’s the yellow jersey, the green jersey, or a stage win. You build your whole team and its strategy around this rider. In the final moment of the contest, it’s all up to him.

The Lead Out Men

It’s the job of the lead out men to safely deliver the top man into proper position to compete at the crucial moment. They do this in two ways:

1. They protect–when things get sort of skittish in the peloton, the lead out men will actually surround the top man, to minimize the chance of accident or injury;
2. They pull–pulling is allowing someone else to draft off of you, which–as I mentioned yesterday–keeps up their speed with a minimum expenditure of energy on their part. When it gets down to the business of the day, the lead out men will form a line in front of the top man, each taking their turn at totally blowing out their own legs to get their top man to the front or keep him there. Ideally, when the last lead out man uses his last gasp of energy, the top man is pretty close to the front with pretty fresh legs.

Team Sky is my favorite team because they are particularly good at developing and giving proper respect to stellar lead out men. Chris Froome was Wiggin’s lead out man. Richie Porte is Froome’s. And with Froome out, Geraint Thomas is rising into Porte’s place.

Domestiques

Domestique is French for ‘servant,’ which pretty much captures the role of these guys on a team. They spend most of their time making deliveries: picking up water bottles for the rest of the team, shuttling rain jackets back and forth between the team car, sometimes passing messages along if there’s a problem with the radio. But it doesn’t stop at deliveries. Absolutely anything that would be helpful is within the scope of a domestique’s job. They will even hand over their bike to the top man or a key lead out man, if there’s a mechanical problem at a crucial moment without a mechanic nearby.

The lead out men and, even more so, the domestiques work very hard, often invisibly, knowing full well that they’re working to get the top prize for someone else. In exchange, they get the satisfaction of a job well done–oh, and the chance to make a living riding a bike. And occasionally, if not much looks like it’s happening among the top GC riders on a given day or there’s no sprint finish for your team to compete in, the lead out men and domestiques might get the day off from the normal duties. Those days, they have a little fun by going out in the break, or trying to win a sprint–or maybe even a stage win–themselves.

Tour de France: an introduction

Do you suddenly find yourself looking for an international sports spectacle to fill that major-sporting-event–of-which-Americans-are-usually-oblivious shaped hole? May I suggest the Tour de France?

You’d be joining in a week late, but there are still 2 weeks to go. There are plenty of exciting finishes, soap opera story lines, interesting characters, grueling mountain climbs, sudden crashes, and pretty shots of abbeys, cathedrals, fields of flowers to come.

What, exactly, is the Tour de France?

The Tour de France takes arguably the most physically demanding major sporting event in the world and places it in perhaps the most picturesque setting available.

Looking at it one way, the Tour de France is just that: a tour of France. You spend 3 weeks following bicyclists as they gradually take a tour of all of the best parts of an obviously lovely country. You take in medieval walled towns, snowcapped Alps, famous vineyards, and world heritage sites. You hear about what happened in this town or that field during Napoleon’s time, or the French Revolution, or one or another of the World Wars. And then you end your time in France with a procession down the Champs-Élysées. The Tour de France is a leisurely travelog.

But while you’re admiring a field of lavender or the red tile roofs of Provence, the 200 cyclists are pushing themselves to their utter physical limit, as they travel 2300 miles in 21 stages in 23 days. They’re climbing those Alps, bouncing along cobblestone streets, and zipping through those medieval villages at 35 mph. And then the next morning they get up and do it again.

Do you like beautiful travel locations? Extreme endurance sports? Both? If so, the Tour de France is for you.

Why is this year a good year to jump in?

The past two years of the Tour have been dominated by Team Sky, a relentlessly disciplined team with a winning strategy that they’ve executed to perfection. Sky’s Chris Froome, in particular, had two flawless Tours. In 2012, he safely delivered his team leader Bradley Wiggins to a Tour win, while incidentally winning second himself–an unheard of feat. In 2013, with Wiggins injured, Froome took charge himself, not just of Sky but of the entire Tour; through a combination of skill, strength, endurance, smarts, and luck, Froome smoothly rode to a championship.

This year, Froome’s luck, at the very least, ran out. He crashed 3 times in 2 days. With one hand and the other wrist broken, try as he might, Froome just couldn’t control his bike anymore on the rain-slick cobblestones. He abandoned the race in the 5th stage.

It was a singularly sad moment when he limped to the team car, closed the door, and ended his Tour.

And yet, it’s led to a very interesting Tour for everyone else.

While Sky’s dominance the past few years has been quite impressive, it’s also been a little dull. It’s like they’ve written a script, showed everyone the script, and then performed exactly what’s in the script. There have been absolutely no surprises, and everyone–not just on Sky, but in the entire Tour–has known their parts. Now, without Froome to anchor the team, Sky can no longer impose its will on the Tour. All of a sudden, no one knows their part. Challengers are wondering if they’re now the favorites. Also-rans wonder if perhaps they’re contenders. And now that it’s no longer Team Sky versus Everyone Else, people can’t really figure out who their friends and enemies are. Suddenly, the Tour is wildly open. It’s even possible that an American will win–something that hasn’t happened very often or very recently (since Lance Armstrong has been struck from the record books). Sure, they’re long shots, and it’s likely that they will fall just short at the crucial moment. But Tejay Van Garderen and Andrew Talansky both have puncher’s chances; that’s something that definitely wasn’t in the Sky script.

Don’t you want to see what happens?

Coming up: How to Win the Tour, Notable Riders, and Anatomy of a Stage.